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that we were living in a hotel--two whooping children in a hotel--so that my mother had to take us out everyday and take us as far away from the hotel as possible to maintain some semblance of respect for the other guests. Obviously, I started to learn German there. From there we moved to Bavaria, again to another hotel in a town called Feldafing which is about forty miles south of Munich.

Now that I look back, I clearly learned two things at the early age of, what was I, seven, something like that. I learned to count, and to count very well, because the mark went from par to the dollar, or something like that, to a billion marks to the dollar in a very short period of time. I did see the people going into the stores carrying the bundles or even pushing the bundles. We, obviously, were reasonably well off because we were dealing in dollars but you had to change them and use them immediately because by next morning they might be worth ten times less. So you would go to the bank, and then you'd buy what you needed, use up all your money and take the goods with you. I learned to count in millions and billions at an earlier age than most people do.

The other sort of vague, impressionistic memory that has served me well since was that I heard the grownups talking about this madman or these crazy characters, but sort of laughing at them, you know, “They're irresponsible,” and “They'll be dealt with,” “They'll go away,” so on and so on. Ever since, when I see a group of people who are bent on sort of tearing apart the system, I suspect that the best thing to do is to tamp them down very early in the game before they get a lot of power.